Biography

My interests in both teaching and research focus on Music as a universal human activity, a non-verbal expressive system communicated primarily through sound. I am interested in understanding how different musical systems work in the contexts in which they are performed, or were performed in the past, and in developing tools for analysing their structure and meaning. In regional terms my interests focus on South Asia, particularly classical and religious music traditions of northern India and Nepal (see Research). In non-regional courses I teach aspects of transcription and analysis, historical ethnomusicology, organology, cognition and meaning in music etc.

Research

In the field of South Asian music my research began by examining the remote past, specifically the earliest documentary evidence for the art and theory of melody in India, and for the origins and development of rāga, the most important and distinctive contribution of Indian culture to music. This project resulted in my book The rāgas of early Indian music: modes, melodies and musical notations (Oxford 1995). A second project was to study the dhrupad genre of North Indian vocal art-music. Collaboration with Prof. Ritwik Sanyal of Banaras Hindu University, himself a leading exponent of the genre, resulted in a joint book, Dhrupad: tradition and performance in Indian music (2004), examining the characteristics of the genre, its history, ideology, revival, performers, performance and structure .

A third area of interest since 1988 has been the music of the Newar community in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, which I have been able to observe with the collaboration of Prof. Gert-Matthias Wegner, Dr Carol Tingey and local musicians. Articles have been published on Buddhist ritual song, 17th-century rāgamālā paintings, and the Ghẽtā̃giśi stick-dance, and I am currently working on a study of the dāphā tradition of sacred singing. In this project I address issues including the meanings of music in its social and ritual context, the importation of historical traditions from India and their adaptation to local needs, the preservation and/or revival of historic music traditions, etc.

Cutting across these areas of research is a preoccupation with the analysis of performance, either with or without the involvement of the performer in the analysis. I have published or completed analyses of performances by the singer Ritwik Sanyal, the sarodist Wajahat Khan and the sitarist Budhaditya Mukherjee. I am interested in the application of ideas from music cognition and orality to the analysis of musical performance.

Recent PhD theses completed under my supervision include those of Anna Morcom (Hindi film songs and the cinema), Nicolas Magriel (sarangi style in North Indian art music), Katherine Brown (Hindustani music in the time of Aurangzeb), Raiomond Mirza (musical structures in Zoroastrian prayer performance), Dean Morris (transmission and performance of khyal compositions), Nicoletta Demetriou (ideology and practice in Greek-Cypriot folk music), and David Kane (Music and Islamisation in Bengal). I directed the Leverhulme Trust project Musical Traditions of Northern India and Nepal, with Carol Tingey and Gert-Matthias Wegner (1990–94); and the AHRC-funded project The Khyāl Song Repertoire of North Indian Art Music, with L. du Perron and N. Magriel (2002–06).

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